Runelords 12.3 - Out of the Rain

Having successfully killed all of the unrepentant, murdering ghouls, collected up as many remains as possible to let the town identify and inter their dead, and both slain and respectfully cremated the remains of Aldern’s dead wife, the three extraplanars departed from the Misgivings and set off back down the road to where they had left Luna and Aldern. They found them still there on the edge of the path, Luna curled up and hugging her knees and Aldern lying face-up in the mud, staring into space. Virgil announced their entrance, “We’re back! There shouldn’t be any further danger to anyone. But that house is seriously cursed; we’ll have to come back and figure that out later.” The two on the ground were unmoved. Virgil looked at them both, sighed slightly, and sat down next to Aldern. “How are you feeling?”
Aldern’s reply was blunt, “Awful.” The tone of his voice conveyed his overwhelmed state.
Virgil pressed, “Are you...feeling stable?” 
“No.”
Pursing his lips slightly, Virgil sighed again, “...Ok. I don’t want to, but I’m probably going to sound like a dick. I’ll try not to, but I probably will, because I need to ask about what happened. We are your friends. We want to help you and everyone else, but to do that, we need to know what happened, and what’s going on. I need to ask you about what you know, so that we can know what to do, and how to help. I know that what happened to you is shitty, and awful, and I’m not trying to make light of it or anything; we aren’t judging you or blaming you, or anything else. We just need to know.” Aldern rolled over to face away from him, but didn’t protest. “Ok?”
“It wasn’t me. It was him. He made me do...awful things,” Aldern managed, “Such awful things…”
Virgil managed a comforting tone, “I know. We know it wasn’t you. You were possessed. Do you know what triggers it? Anyway of predicting it before Lordship takes over?"
"No...it just...happens..."
Nodding consideringly with pursed lips, Virgil changed topics, "Alright. Do you know how any of this happened?"
Aldern replied miserably, “I don’t know.”
“Well, we last saw you about two weeks ago; you were going back to Medinipur. Can you remember that?”
“Yes…” he said, “I didn’t go to the city. I came here. I just needed to get some of the rats, and the mould.”
This reason gave Virgil pause, “...Ok then, we’ll come back to that. So you got here, to the manor, a few weeks ago. What happened?”
“Nothing.”
“Did you see visions? The hauntings? Anything strange at all?”
“No. Nothing.” Virgil raised his eyebrow at the negative response, but Aldern continued, “I went to the basement, and started collecting the rats. Nothing was strange. I started feeling sick though…It’s probably whatever the rats had...”
“You weren’t attacked by anything?”
“No.”
“Then…” Virgil pondered, “How did you get...like this?”
“I don’t know. Everything’s so blurry…” Aldern lamented. “I got sick...and I don’t remember.”
Virgil was still confused; he muttered to himself, “But...where did it come from...You don’t get ghouls from nothing, there has to be an original source somewhere...Was it the rats?” He spoke up, “Did the rats bite you?”
“M-maybe? I don’t know…”
Virgil waved it off, “Yeah, rats bite everything, who knows… There were no ghouls though? There weren’t any down there before you?”
“...No…” Aldern was quiet for a second before he clenched up, rolling into a ball, “It was me, alright?! I did it, it was all me! Just leave me here to my fate!”
“Hey!” Virgil asserted, firm but still reassuring, “It was not you, alright? None of that was you. It was Lordship. You were possessed, and he did those things, not you. You aren’t to blame. None of us blame you at all. It was horrible, yes, but it was not you. And we aren’t leaving you here either. Now,” he said, changing the topic, “we don’t know where the ghouls started from. Maybe it was the rats; we’ll have to investigate more. Anyways, that’s for later. For now...why were you collecting rats?”
He shuddered, “Ask Luna. I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”
Virgil turned to her; she had looked up as they had been talking, and she replied, “He...he told me that he had run out of money, and took out a large loan from some organization calling themselves the Brotherhood of Seven. They had come collecting, and told him they’d wipe his debt in exchange for rats and mould from the basement.”
Aldern added quietly, “I’d given them the mould before...but they said it wasn’t enough. They needed more this time.”
Virgil raised an eyebrow, “Brotherhood of Seven...ominous. Who are they?”
Aldern shook his head again, “Ask Luna.”
Once again, she explained for him, “He...he didn’t know too much. They’re a secret organization or something, of wealthy families. He doesn’t know any of them personally, only that there’s a messenger he meets on the second day of the second week of the month in a sawmill in Medinipur, and that we’d need his signet ring from his house to meet up them.”
“Alright. Simple enough. Are you coming with us to find out what this is all about?” Virgil asked to Foxglove.
“Don’t,” he warned, “Don’t get mixed up in this. You’ll only get hurt.”
Virgil scoffed, “Heh. What are they going to do to us? What do they have?”
“Connections,” he replied ominously.
He was unfazed, and shrugged as he said, “Well, what are connections going to do? We don’t have jobs or property, or reputations to lose. What’s the worst they can do, send assassins? That’s not a huge deal.”
Aldern was much less than convinced, “They’ll kill you!”
“Eh, only if they send assassins who are better than us. No one ever sends the good assassins first, and by the time they do that, we’ll be done with them.”
“They’ll come for you. They’ll know who you are, and they won’t give up.”
“We’ll see. We can’t let them do things with cursed fungus and cursed rats that may or may not carry an undead infection. You said they already had some of the fungus, so they already apparently know a fair bit about this place, for an abandoned, haunted manor in the woods. We need to find out what. Also, if there’s anything special that needs to be done to burn it down. Because that is a really haunted house. So,” he reiterated, “are you going to come with us?”
Aldern shuddered, “I can’t.”
“Well...what do you want to do then?”
“I have nothing. I’ve lost everything. My house, my money, my life...I have nothing.”
“Well, nothing to lose then,” Virgil said with a touch of brightness. “Besides, you’re still alive.”
“I am not.”
Virgil shrugged, “Functionally. You still have your mind, your will, and you can still move around and do things. Close enough.” Aldern didn’t reply. “Well...do people know that you’re dead?”
“What?”
“Do they know? It’s a bit tricky if you’ve been declared dead, but if not, then you can just go back to what you were doing. You still sound the same, still have your personality; with a bit of disguising, you could go back to your life like nothing happened.”
Aldern threw up a hand, “Look at me! I can’t hide this!”
Virgil was unfazed, “Sure you can. There’s tons of magic for that.”
“I’m no caster,” he replied bitterly. “And besides, everyone will notice.”
“You don’t need to be a caster; you can get clothes or potions that do it for you. And no one will notice. Trust me, I’ve met much less human-looking people than you wear some disguises and go back to their lives like nothing ever changed. Cross my heart,” he said, making a gesture over his chest. After a pause, he asked, “...Don’t you have friends or family that will miss you?”
His voice was bitter again as he said, “I wouldn’t ever want them burdened with this.”
“I’m sure they’d miss you. Better different than gone, I always say.” Aldern didn’t reply, so Virgil shrugged, “Let’s put it like this. We’re your friends. We will help you no matter what you want to do. We will make sure that this curse gets broken, and that the Lordship can’t ever have hold of you again. If you want to get a disguise and go back to your life, we will help you do that. If you want to take this as an opportunity to start new, change your name, move away, become a baker or a longshoreman or whatever else you wanted to be but thought you couldn’t, we’ll help you do that. And if you really, honestly, just want to hide in the ditch here, then we’ll help you do that. Because we’re your friends, and we’ll help you get through this.” He still didn’t reply. Virgil gave him another minute before he asked, “Want to go get a hotel room, and get out of the rain?”
“I can’t go into town,” he said bluntly.
“Sure you can. Why can’t you?”
“I’ll attack people again…”
“Hey,” Virgil said, lightly scolding, “That wasn’t you. That was the Lordship. You didn’t attack anybody. And if he takes over again...well, honestly, I appreciate your self-confidence, but you couldn’t get through all three of us no matter how badly you tried.”
“Four,” he corrected quickly.
Virgil glanced over to Luna, “...Well, yes, I just try not to volunteer Luna as a human shield, but you’re right, she wouldn’t let you hurt anyone either. So you’re certainly not going to get past all four of us. We won’t let anything happen.” Aldern was silent. After another moment passed, Virgil stood up and held out his hand, “Come on. I can’t honestly think that, in your heart, you honestly want to lie in the road forever. So let’s get out of the rain and you can sit in a hotel room, alright?” Aldern rolled back over and looked at Virgil’s proffered hand. He considered it for a second before reaching out and taking it, letting the other man help him to his feet. Virgil smiled. 
Category:Rise of the Runelords