[PF] Rumours & Fears 5th March 2019 (Kalta)

Kalta seems more down than usual in the Cavernous Seashank that night. Though it’s still crowded due to the plague in Daring Heights, she avoids making eye contact with anyone.

If you ask what has got her to drink what seems an excessive amount even for a half-orc, she might tell you. She’ll glare and try and pretend she’s tougher than she is, but if you're a friend, she’ll tell you.

She’ll tell you how a group of adventurers were asked to find a missing child. A boy who had been sent away to a nearby abbey for his own safety with a trusted adult and their daughter, but the parents had not heard word back that they’d reached safety. She knew some of the party already, having adventured with Bodhi and Crumblesnout a few times, but hadn’t met the aarakocra druid Pieni before, or the wild magic sorcerer and the cleric who were with them.

Kalta had hoped that the children had made it safely to the abbey, and that the adults had simply been waylaid on the way back, but she knew in her heart that it was unlikely to be true.

She’ll tell you how they were accompanied by a gnome who knew the children, and how he didn’t want them to rest on the road but she agreed with the rest of the adventurers that they should.

All her training and experience tells her that dealing with exhaustion would have made it harder to get out of there alive. Given how it turned out, though, she feels differently.

She’ll tell you that they travelled for a while before they found signs of the travellers leaving behind their cart. Two different sets of tracks, one leading towards the abbey and one leading further away.

They followed the tracks heading away from the Abbey. Kalta pointed out that if the kids were at the abbey, they were where they were meant to be. If they were in the marshes, they were most likely in need of help.

That, at least, was the right decision.



When they found one of the children, there was no doubt she was dead. She wasn’t even truly there- she was a shadow, a ghost, some echo of who she had been. She didn’t attack them until one of the adventurers Kalta had only just met attacked her. Even then, she was calmed by the presence of the old gnome who had known both children. She vanished, departing the mortal plane.

They were too late. They had been too slow, they had let this happen. Kalta searched for the girl’s body, or any sign of it, but they had no luck.



She hadn’t had much hope for the other child, but they found him alive and well a short way away. The gnome reassured him even as the adventurers tried to ask what had happened to the others. Through his distress, all they could learn was that there was something wrong at the abbey, and that the adults were missing.

They took the child back to his mother, who gave them their payment and tossed them out for rudeness. And now Kalta sits at the Cavernous Seashank, downing another tankard of “piss” ale, and wishing that any of it had made any difference to Clara, the poor child who had died.





(Sorry for the lack of detail/names and any mistakes, I wasn’t able to make any notes for this session and my memory isn’t wonderful!)