Pumpkins, Portraits, and Pandemonium
Barnabus
We defeated the cruel talking doll Pincushion and it’s animated carpet hench… thing? It’s certainly not a hench-Man so hench-thing will have to do.
Our attempt to show the children they were safe now maaaay have fallen a bit flat when Melina decided to take pincushion’s head as a trophy. Oh well.
We rallied our growing horde of misfit children and headed up to the top of the staircase to see if we could round up the rest of the rascals. Opening the door to the dormitory, we found two more of the little rascals. One was in bed sick while the other cared for him. Apparently, Broder, the dwarf child, had eaten a bad mushroom and was so sick he could not stand up on his own.
We consulted our resident mushroom expert, Fungi. Strange how that is the only one of Melina’s trophies who she didn’t kill and dismember… and he was in a pan getting ready to be devoured when we found him. How odd, but then she is exceptionally odd, even for a human.
But back to the matter at hand, Fungi told us we could probably counteract the bad mushroom effect by… force feeding Broder a different type of mushroom. And apparently they were common in this general area, so off we went to do some mushroom hunting. We left the factory interior as quietly as we could and approached a pumpkin patch that seemed a good spot to find mushrooms.
Unfortunately, our luck did not hold and the pumpkin patch was guarded by several snakes. We didn’t waste much time before we decided it was time to celebrate “Whacking Day” and after driving off the snake guards, quickly found an abundant variety of mushrooms. Feeding Broder the right mushroom had an almost instant effect and he recovered almost immediately. With that sorted out, we proceeded along the outskirts of Loomlurch and headed toward a nearby door.
Outside the door, we saw something odd - a beaten up old wooden rocking horse with an odd indentation in his forehead. It looked… suspiciously like something was intended to fit there. Something like… a unicorn horn perhaps? I tried fitting the horn and it immediately slotted in perfectly… and an ethereal unicorn spirit appeared. He introduced himself as Elidon and told us placing the horn in place had freed his spirit from the hag’s curse. He told us he would head off to meet his mate Lamorna at the wayward pool but before he left, he wished us well, gave permission to continue using his horn (as long as it was used wisely and for good) and healed and blessed the party.
We proceeded on back into Loomlurch and encountered a strange parlor. There were two other doors, we quickly locked and barred the southern door which connected back to the rest of the tree… house (?) we had already explored. Our luck improved and Will came down the stairs with two of the three remaining children. We only needed to find Mischka, the child who’d been locked up in the kitchen.
I moved to the northern door and began working to pick the lock on the door…
Meanwhile the rest of the party and the children surveyed the strange parlor. They saw a total of four portraits hung on the wall behind strange thorns which seemed to protect the portraits. There were three which were obviously the hag sisters - we recognized Bavlorna, Skabatha, and what must have been the third sister. The fourth portrait was a very attractive woman, could that be Zybilna? Amryn deftly ‘liberated’ the portrait of Skabatha so we would have a bargaining chip for Bavlorna. Then he got greedy and attempted to pilfer the portrait of Zybilna but pricked his hand on the thorns (should have used that mage hand….). The portraits instantly transformed into what appeared to be.. Amryn’s family?
By now I had sprung the lock to what turned out to the be the kitchen. I saw the last child chained to the stove. Unfortunately, there was also a small dog sized dragon who noticed me immediately and started to get up. At the same time what could only be Skabatha had started stomping toward the southern door and she did not sound pleased…