Session Date: 8/12/2023
We take some time to heal up and we try to recall if we know anything bout tooth fairies. We recall they’re very vicious and won’t respond very well to diplomacy: they want teeth. They want to steal our teeth. They are also a swarm, so they will be immune to precision damage in this instance. They are weak to area or splash damage. We manage to kill the fairies and they explode into a sticky white dust.
Opal asks if we can just turn around and leave and Killian explains that the portal behind us disappeared and we have to take care of this. Ria puts her ear on the next door and listens and she hears a voice on the other side either talking to someone else or muttering to themself. Ria peeks through the keyhole of the door and sees a large wooden dining table sitting beneath some 20’ high ceilings. To the south are large slabs of meat, humanoid skulls lining the wall, and small niches in the walls with glowing larvae as macabre lanterns. There’s a passage north connecting to 2 more doors, and a centaur woman. She wears a scarred black breastplate and a horse skull like a helm.
The centaur woman shifts and speaks to Ria, saying to enter. She’s Captain Salla and asks what we are doing and Opal says that we are travelers and we’ve stranded ourselves here on accident. I can tell she is feeling at peace and comfortable in this place of death and misery. Killian tries to charm her to get her to let us go by but she can feel that someone tried to charm her. Combat starts. We fight very hard, with Ria eventually taking a huge bite out of her horse half. The cloak that drapes off of her horse body, woven of a thousand leaves, whirls around and scrapes thorns against Ria as well: a warning to not stay too close. Valentine finishes it off with a ridiculous roll through her for no reason.
Captain Salla smiles at us and says exquisite as she dies.
On her corpse:
- Longsword
- Spear
- Steel Shield
- Cloak of Gnawing Leaves
- 2x Healing potions
We give the cloak to Ria, one healing for Ria, another for Opal, and Valentine takes the rest sans spears to sell.
We need to take some time to rest and catch our breath. Hiera can tell which pieces are people meat, some of it is horse or deer. We realize that Captain Salla is a cannibal. We take some time to sit down at the table and eat some of the not people meat and rest. Opal throws the blade ball into the fire and Valentine comes up behind him and gently touches his back as if to throw him into the fire. He gives a glare to Valentine, and Valentine asks Opal if he’s okay. Opal is struggling with the fact that there is people meat here that’s been actually butchered and cleaned. Valentine suggests leaving the meat room and going back to the table and Opal says that he just wanted to take care of the weird ball thing first.
Ria puts her ear up to the west door in the northern tunnel and she hears nothing. In the eastern door there is a noise of chittering - not like a ton of tiny bugs, but just one. Ria and Valentine step through the left door as Hiera mentions it might be trapped. Inside the room are ten framed paintings lining the wall. The paintings depict scenes, and there is something alien about the paintings themselves - made by something unusual.
Ria looks at the paintings and they shift and move, and she is able to discern Kaneepo the Slim’s history:
Kaneepo awoke fully formed in Nighthold a very long time ago. Kaneepo struggled with their identity, seeming to be the only one of its kind. After years it got the feeling that it’s actually a kin to boogies and boogeymen (and Slenderman) but Kaneepo still wasn’t exactly that: boogeymen feed on fear and possibly souls, but Kaneepo was drawn to and drank shadows rather than fear. That made the boogeymen disgusted at the perversion that Kaneepo was, and they were threatened by him. After Kaneepo was rejected, Kaneepo sought shelter with Count Ranalc - an elder fey (basically a god), and one of the nastiest. Keneepo still felt alone and that turned to resentment, and Kaneepo saw themselves a progenitor of a new fae race, and ruler of a new realm. One night, while wandering the shadow forest of Nighthold, Kaneepo came upon the corpse of human being with a strange leaf, finding a strange arch and passing through it using the strange leaf as a key. They made it to the Wyrewood and they recognized the opportunity and began hunting the areas elves, feasting on their shadows. They began kidnapping elves and experimenting on them to evolve them into creatures similar to Kaneepo, which all failed. Unfortunately for Kaneepo, this was at the height of elven power before Elffall. A group of elven heros banded together to push Kaneepo through the 7th arch to the First World, imprisoning Kaneepo into the stump of a tree, taking the gate key to ensure Kaneepo was stranded. The final portrait is just blackness, representative of millennia passing. In time, Kaneepo was able to flex the planar fabric and break from their prison, as the stump was a cocoon for their power. After all of this time, Kaneepo didn’t need to key: they were able to shape some of the first world around the stump and thus create breaches into other planes. They then went to seek revenge against their elven prosecutors, which is when Kaneepo created the elf killing curse in this area of the material plane. Kaneepo then realized that because of Elffall the population of elves was already in decline, and so they started to hunt other humanoids in The Thinlands. The curse still worked but it wasn’t as devastating as they wanted as the elves had largely left the area. They started sending gorgas because of all of this. The missing moment happened, and the elf curse was gone, so this is when Kaneepo reached out to Bolan to fix the curse because Kaneepo still wants to genocide the elves. The plan was to create a bigger curse and extend the Thinlands into the material plane itself. The final depicts us, the heroes, at the 7th Arch encounter, stopping the unicorn from being sacrificed.
Ria is glad we stopped everything from happening, and Opal turns to say that he looks better than in the painting. Valen was actually in the painting, but seems to have been painted over so Hiera is now in the annals of time instead. Hiera is particularly interested in the last picture as they were definitely not there for that. Opal doesn’t like the painting.
We all give the next room a listen and there sounds like there’s nothing inside of the next room.
We go back to the room with chittering and Valentine opens the door and he sees a 7’ tall insectoid creature with 4 arms, 2 legs, a termite-like abdomen. Valentine doesn’t want to admit it out loud, but this thing does seem to be a female. This creature notices Valentine and starts to chitter and begins approaching Valentine directly.