9.3.22 - The Cleric of Consent in the Magnificent Mansion of Mud

I followed his lead and immediately decapitated Auntie Gristle-gums but she didn’t die like how people normally do. Instead, her head started cackling at my feet and her body started trying to pick up the head, so I stabbed the head and tried my best to keep it away from her. Some giant mud-monsters popped out of the mud near She-Rah and Cannon and were blocking them from getting to the hags. The auntie sprouted bat wings after she stole her head back from me and she flew up to the ceiling where weird plants grew out of her to reattach it to her body. In front of Cannon, Granny Lolmeta turned into a bunch of bugs as the goo in the cauldron started to glow and bubble. Cannon pulled the water out of the mud and made a giant wave that went over the cauldron, revealing that there was a form at the bottom that might try to come through and attack us. Rhys summoned a bunch of little hyenas to try to distract the mud monsters as the creature from the cauldron showed themself. They were a lizardy looking person covered in dozens of mouths that sang a very beautiful lullaby that Rhys fell asleep to. The creature saw this and somehow teleported to her before completely engulfing her form. After She-Rah took out the mud monster she was fighting, we were able to quickly deal with the rest of our visible enemies and save Rhys from the creature and all of its mouths.

When the sounds of the last mud monster sloshing back into the muddy ground had passed, we could hear a faint ticking coming from all around us with the magical lights in each corner of the hut flashing in time to it. We gathered ourselves around the door which didn’t want to open so She-Rah forced it open. It sucked us out of the hut before we could take too much time to look around.

Once back on the porch, the chimes were still going, and a few hours had passed while we were inside. We decided to head back to Reaver’s house to recover from our encounter with the hags and start planning our next move now that we had secured Elisande’s choice. However, as soon as we stepped off of the porch, we noticed there was a sinister chanting coming from up the hill at the temple and nobody was around us on the streets. Cannon and the others went to rest, since they were still very hurt, while I went to check out the chanting.

At the temple, I could see that everyone in town had come and was kneeling before the statue of Elisande. Everyone was chanting in some language I didn’t know, but it didn’t seem good. The statue itself had trails of red running down it that seemed very much like blood. I went back to the others before the people could finish their chanting to tell them what I had seen. Cannon was very unhappy about this and led us back out into the street just in time to snag the first few people coming down from the temple to continue about their day. These people do not look good; they seem sickly and tired so Cannon tried to cast a restoration spell on one of them. It made the man look better, but he did not seem to believe Cannon when he tried to tell the man that they were being used by hags. The man just told him that they didn’t think it was nice to call the nice old ladies hags and that they had been told that if they wanted families they would have to stay here and that was not a bad price to pay if they would get to have their families.

We went back to Reaver’s house to plan all together what to do next. Rhys thinks that our deal with the Hags for Elisande to have a choice in her fate will be honored even though we attacked them because there was nothing ever agreed upon that we couldn’t attack them that would break the deal. Cannon sent a message to Elisande telling her that she was going to have a choice and that the Hags were growing babies for her to eat. He said her response was that the Ma’ams had told her they had gotten everything ready for her and that it was her destiny to join them. Could anyone really fight their destiny? In the next message he sent to her, he said, people with power often abuse it to get what they want from others and destiny is whatever you make it. We would support her no matter what choice she makes. This time there was a pause before he told us her response. She said she doesn’t want to hurt people, so if destiny is fake, what did Cannon think she should do? What did Rivir think she should do? The last message Cannon sent to her included him telling her that we couldn’t tell her what to do, but we would help her in any way we could. We knew another hag who we would ask to help teach her about her powers if she didn’t want to join the Hags of Greenmist. In her final response to Cannon, she told us that she wants to know more before she helps the coven and she thanked us for winning her a choice.

Next, we contacted the Green Hag of the Quivering Forest to ask her if she would mentor Elisande or at least tell her more about being a hag. The only response Cannon got was that it was rude to ask for favors when you were not face to face with someone. We decided we had done what we could on Greenmist for the time and we needed to go get a gift for the Green Hag and make our way closer to Thar to plan how to handle She-Rah’s uncle. Rhys cast her spell so that we could walk back across the bay without needing to worry about where Warsh was. We passed him and a full ferry full of people who were making their way towards the island, and when we arrived on the beach we could see there were still more people waiting to go to Greenmist.

We pressed on for a few more hours before making camp out of sight of the island. I took the first watch and it started off normal, but as the night went on there were voices on the wind. There were voices I knew and they were tinted with this silvery laughter I didn’t recognize. As soon as I thought I could make out what they were saying, it became just the wind in the plants around us. When I woke Cannon up for his watch I warned him about the voices. He was not concerned about them and told me it would be okay in the morning. In the morning, She-Rah told us that there was a weird wagon with people wearing animal masks that had pulled off the road just before dawn. She said they had all had a meal and then gotten into the wagon and hadn’t left since.

Rhys immediately went over and started talking to the horses about what kind of life they had had and if their masters treated them okay. She said the horses had a pretty good life but they only traveled at night, but that it was okay because they only ever went from the very north to the very south on this same road. They said they always had this job but the people changed at every place they stopped and that is why they wore the masks. She looked at their hooves and figured that she would be able to identify their movements on the road if they ever passed through this way again. Once she was satisfied with their care, she came back to us and opened a doorway to the green dragon’s garden at Valejo Castle. We left her to enjoy the space while we went to find breakfast at Madam Fiona’s Teakettle since it had been so long since we had seen her. Cannon startled the guards on the outside of the door who were completely unprepared for us to come out of the castle. She-Rah and I told them it was alright since they weren’t expecting anyone to come out of the room and Cannon was harsh on everyone, but they should still do better next time. (Level Up!!!)