%% date:: [[2024-06-23]] %% # [[008_20240623 Beasts of the Dark]] ![[008_20240623.svg]] ## Session Summary > [!tldr] [[008_20240623 Beasts of the Dark]] > ^summary %% ## Video [Video](https://youtu.be/42vsF2UuBdU) %% --- ## Recap ![[ttrpgs/The Great Dark/007_20240616 The Prism of Disruption#^summary]] --- ## Log > [!abstract] The Sea's Bargain > Tarrin Bellweather’s longtime mentor, the Lightkeeper Fahra Slate of Seasway, has sent her an urgent, mysterious message, using the encryption code they shared when Tarrin was a child, hidden in an otherwise innocuous letter: > > *Come home as soon as you can.* > > *Don’t tell anyone.* > > *It’s a good thing you have all that official Candela training now.* > > *You’re going to need it.* Cold open - A woman is waiting on a porch - A small boy staggers from the water onto the beach and walks up to the village. - The woman watches but doesn't help him or call to him. She shivers. - She goes back to the lighthouse when he's gone. > [!tip] Cold open > It’s a dark and stormy night. > > The full moon only peeks fitfully out from behind the clouds, providing brief illumination to the beach in front of the Seasway lighthouse. > > There’s a wooden beach chair nestled in the sand near the start of the hills, and you would be forgiven for assuming it empty. But no: a woman lies there, almost motionless, bundled up in a heavy sweater and a thick wool cap. A few strands of white wispy hair have escaped the cap, and flutter wildly in the heavy wind. > > You might assume she sleeps. But no: her eyes scan the gloomy shore, the cresting waves, intensely. She is watching for something. > > Minutes pass, hours. Still she watches. And just before dawn, her vigilance is rewarded. Amidst the regular crashing of waves — a splash. Off to her right. Clumsy splashing. A small body. A child. A boy. Stumbling out of the surf onto the beach. > > Though he staggers, he does not fall. Step after step, he navigates the sands, till he finds the footpath leading up to the village. You might assume the woman waits for him. But no: she watches him go, but does not call to him, does not help him. When he is gone, she shivers, her first such gesture of the night. > > She gets up, folds up her chair, and goes back to the lighthouse for some well-deserved rest. We go to [[Seasway]]! Tarrin asks us to wait outside, but [[Lightkeeper Fahra Slate]], a woman in her 60s, has already seen us and tells Tarrin to call us in. - Ash: - Eric: New suit Tarrin has always wanted to be independent and to be treated like an adult, not a child. she'd already lived on her own a bit before coming to Fahra. Fahra is like a cool aunt who's not too smotherly. Tarrin has told us she can be a little bit rude and too direct at times. She's a prickly eccentric but when she takes Tarrin's hands, some of the worry and fear comes through. We go to the [[Everhollow Lighthouse]]. We see where Tarrin's bedroom was. We go to Tarrin's parents bedroom. On the bed are her parents, [[Anise Bellweather|Anise]] and [[Nils Bellweather|Nils]]. They look like they're in their 20s or 30s, and they look the way they did when Tarrin last saw them. THey seem to be sleeping. Tarrin's a bit overwhelmed. Then Tarrin looks a little more closely and they have smooth, pale skin that isn't the pinkish skin of youth-- it's the pale whiteness of bodies. Their clothing is sodden, like they've been in the water for a long time. Their eyes open naturally like normal people waking up. Joy fills their faces. They move exactly like her parents. They don't seem to be simulacra of them. - Tarrin asks where they've been, and they say they don't remember. But we know that they do know something, but it's a painful memory. - Tarrin takes 1 Brain mark. This is a lot for Tarrin. IF she can't figure out how to feel about this, she will keep taking Brain marks. - Tarrin's mum was the mayor and was more serious. Her dad was kind of like the jokester. - Fahra says as far as they can tell, they're dead. - Tarrin bolts out of the room making some excuse. She's overwhelmed. I take out my bleed detector. THere's a lot of bleed coming from the room. It's not deadly, but it's a lot. Tarrin retreats to Auntie Fahra, and I follow. Eric and Ash go into the room to examine Tarrin's parents. - Eric confirms that they're dead, as Fahra said. Their bones seem to have more give. They kind of bend when pressure is applied. He's not sure how long their bodies will last. It's really an unnatural construction of bodies. Eric also takes 1 Brain. Tarrin's mother's name: Anise. - Team Outside: we talk to Fahra. She says "These aren't the only ones." Over the last month, there have been hundreds. They come out of the ocean at night and they go to where they last lived. Fahra has theories that she thinks Candela Obscura might not want to hear about. Fahra has been talking to the elders of Seasway, but they all decided that they didn't want to have outsiders interfere. - > When the sea takes, the sea also gives back. When the sea gives back, the sea also takes. That is the sea's bargain. - Fahra believes that the Bleed settled into the ocean. She thinks Candela should have been keeping a closer watch on the ocean than they have. It's always been Fahra's job to keep an eye on the ocean. She thinks the sea is getting ready to take something big, and so it's giving back everything it's taken. - Countdown die introduced! Every day, we'll pick one high-stakes roll. If you fail it (full failure), it will go down one. - Fahra said [[The Primacy]] said they should upgrade the light in the lighthouse. When the light went out in the lighthouse, the bodies started coming back. The technicians keep saying they can't get a handle of the new system. Fahra believes that the lighthouse was always a Lens that kept the ocean back. Plan A is to get the light working. We're here to come up with Plan B. - Fahra admits that she's played off The Primacy and Candela being rivals in the past, to get more funding. - Fahra said the bodies go to the places where they last lived. Anise and Nils are the names of the parents. SHe seems sad when she says she thinks they're the same people. The dead outnumber the living at this point. - Me: What if it's not that something's coming, but that they're already here? - What if the light wasn't turned off, but the dark was turned on? - This is a regular Candela Obscura base. - Fahra has told Candela Obscura before about her theories of a lens, but she pissed people off and they had grudges. THey didn't believe her. We reconvene. - Calliope wants to talk to the technicians. - An older man and a younger man (apprentice). Madam Forena is dealing with the lighthouse and is a local. The younger one is a bit smitten with me and is eager to talk to me. The bulbs themselves need to be quite unusual and resilient to create such a bright light. The other part was getting the electricity up this far and transformed for the bulbs. It took a couple of weeks to install it, and then in the last week there have been unexplained failures. Even the older man is puzzled by it, but something else keeps going wrong. The younger one keeps talking about things being cursed. The older one is more science-focused. The electricity is within normal tolerances. The Primacy had guaranteed that they'd have enough power. I take out my bleed detector and there doesn't seem to be an immediate source here. - Eric wants to observe the parents. - Tarrin was a bit of a hellion - she was very curious and got into a lot of trouble. If he ever wants to embarrass Tarrin, he has all the embarrassing stories he needs! - Nils and Anise love him because he wants to be around them. But he doesn't really have a good idea of what they're capable of or what the rate of decay is. Eric wants to write a paper about zombies and become very famous that way. He gets invited to dinner. He notices that they still think they know where things are, but they don't. When the facade slips, Eric sees their fear. He also sees that they know more about what's going on than they want to admit. - ERic does a second roll, a Read, to figure out why they're afraid. He succeeds. Him seeing through their facade kind of ruins dinner. Their movements are sometimes jerky and monstrous. They're inhuman. It's kind of scary. They say to him: "Don't send us back. It's cold. It's dark. Let us stay here. Please." Eric gives them sugar pills and they almost snarl and bite his hand as he does so. They're very feral, like beasts of the dark. Then it's gone and Anise the mother is back. Eric gives an excuse to leave and not stay there tonight. They let him go... he tells us that he feels that the phenomenon may be reaching a conclusion. - Ash wants to walk among the town and take inventory of who's living and who's dead. - Some windows are open. He can see that the living are interacting with the dead. - Goes to the library to do research. Fahra had thought that the people had been copied and sent back. Ash thought that maybe it was the real people that were brought back. Ash finds the decay rate: it's probably a couple weeks at most. It would be longer, but the time in the ocean wasn't great for them. - Tarrin wants to examine the light. %% # Text Elements # Drawing ```json {"type":"excalidraw","version":2,"source":"https://github.com/zsviczian/obsidian-excalidraw-plugin/releases/tag/2.0.25","elements":[],"appState":{"theme":"dark","gridSize":null,"viewBackgroundColor":"#ffffff"}} ``` %%