Hello, Everyone!
Last time our heroes, just having found that they had a fourth member whom they didn't remember, turned to Granny Gretel for answers. She didn't have any but managed to make a small deal with Bruno and Aurum before Mary could intervene.
Then, Mary had a talk with a person in the inn and found out that strange things had happened in his home. They decided to investigate before going to bed.
The man’s name was Loyosh. His house was small and made of bricks, and was two stories high. He invited them in and introduced them to his son, Brandon.
“Hello,” the boy said meekly. He was scribbling something that looked like homework on a piece of paper.
“Hello! I hope we’re not intruding,” Mary said. She turned to Loyosh. “Can we see the place of the break-in, please?”
He nodded and led them up the stairs to a small bedroom with a full bed, a dressing table and a large wardrobe in the corner. He opened the latter and pointed inside.
“You see?” he said. “They filled my wardrobe with women’s clothes. This must be a jinx or a prank of some kind! Right?”
“Thank you for showing us,” Mary said. “We’ll need to investigate some more before we can give you an answer. Can you leave us? We’ll come talk to you if we need any more clarifications.”
Loyosh looked at them suspiciously, dug out a small coin purse from the bottom of a drawer and obediently went out.
The trio spread out to look for clues. Mary checked out the wardrobe and--yes--half of it was full of women’s clothes. Exactly half. Like there had been two people sharing the space and one of them was female.
“There’s blood on the windowsill,” Bruno said. “And the window has been broken from the outside. Just like in Rory’s inn.”
“And there’s makeup and beauty stuff on the dressing table,” Aurum said.
“Are we thinking the same thing?” Mary said.
“The man is a crossdresser?” Aurum said.
She frowned. They were definitely not thinking the same thing.
“That man had a wife and she was living here with him, and he forgot about her the same way we forgot about Lanurey,” she said. “I thought it was obvious…”
“Oh, yeah, that makes more sense than my thing,” Aurum grinned.
“Let me talk to the family,” Mary said. “You try to find out more clues.”
She went down to the kitchen and found Loyosh and Brandon making themselves a late dinner. They weren’t very good at it, looking for the spices and cutlery, a faint smell of burnt food lingering in the air. It was like they were used to someone else doing that particular chore.
“Hello,” she said. “I have to ask, what happened to your wife?”
“Wife?” Loyosh said. “I don’t have a wife.”
Mary looked at Brandon.
“He’s adopted. I found him in the sea. You see, I’m a sailor and…” he rubbed his head as if he’d suddenly gotten a headache.
Mary kept on looking at the boy. He was the spitting image of the man, with a few differences in the shape of the eyes and the form of the face. At the moment, he was staring at the opposite wall. He looked so lost!
Her heart grew heavy in her chest.
“We’re ready,” Aurum’s voice came from the stairs. He and Bruno climbed down and nodded to Mary with an expression of ‘we’ll tell you afterwards’.
“Um, yes,” she said. “We’ll get to you when we have more information.”
“T-thank you,” Loyosh said.
Right on the doorstep, Mary stopped and turned back.
“We’ll find her,” she said.
“You and your promises,” Bruno said. “What if she’s dead?”
“I… I don’t know,” Mary said. “I wanted to give them hope.”
“They don’t even realize there’s something to hope about.”
“Sorry…”
They were walking towards Trim’s inn in the dark of the night. Ekoba’s atmosphere was pressing on them but it seemed less potent now than it had been around Loyosh’s house.
“So, what did you find?”
“Check this out,” Bruno said, whipping out a piece of paper.
It was a family portrait. Mary recognized Loyosh and Brandon, but there was a woman with them as well. She was smiling and holding the boy who was maybe a bit younger than they’d seen him. Loyosh had put an arm around her waist and looked just as happy as the rest of them.
“There was a marriage certificate as well,” Bruno said. “And a birth certificate for Brandon. He was their child all right. Loyosh and Sara Emek.”
“Then they have forgotten about her,” Mary sighed. “But I think they weren’t the only ones.”
She told the others about Brandon and Loyosh’s difficulty to make themselves a dinner.
“I think that there might be something like that at Trim’s as well,” she said.
Trim’s inn was almost empty at that time of night. Most of the customers had gone home and only a few of the heavier drinkers stayed in the corners of the main hall. Mary and Aurum talked to the inn-keeper and found out that their difficulties with the work around the inn began about two months ago, shortly after they, too, had had a 'break-in'.
Bruno asked for the place of the actual forced entry and investigated around the window which had been repaired long since. He found a few old shards of glass between the floor boards and a long, long dried out blood splatter under the windowsill.
There had been women’s clothes in Trim’s wardrobe, too, and his son Piper, too, didn’t have a mother. According to the inn-keeper, she’d left the family years ago.
“Everyone seems to find different ways to justify the hole that the missing person left in their life,” Bruno said.
“Like…” Mary swallowed. “Like us, when Lanurey used to do things for us.”
She went back to what she’d read in her journal and tried to think of what her brain had replaced Lanurey with. Ghosts. Phantoms. Fairies. Bruno had been more down-to-earth and his explanations of the strange happenings were more down-to-earth, too. And Aurum… Mary realized that she hadn’t been paying much attention to him lately. If Lanurey and he used to be together, would forgetting her affect him more than the rest of them?
She rubbed her forehead. It was beginning to ache again.
The puzzle pieces are starting to build up a picture. Let's see where it'll take our heroes!
See you next time!
Take care and be well!
(Also, here's a link to the Chapter Guide, the Glossary and the Map for the series. You're welcome!)
An important disclaimer: These are my notes from a D&D game turned into a narrative. All the worldbuilding and NPC encounters belong to our DM, and all the actions of the other main characters (Aurum and Bruno) belong to my co-players. My contribution to the story is only everything Mary-related (actions, reactions, inner thoughts), as well as the writing itself.