83. Red Rona

* Aerendyl, Clwyd, Pyt, and Wilfred have found themselves sailing atop the River Styx as it winds its way through Mephistar, the Fifth Hell. They seek to escape, and so their only path for now seems to be upwards, to the Iron City of Dis, the Fourth Hell. But their path forward has been blocked by a dam of infernal metal connected to a riverside processing and bottling plant for Red Rona's Styx Juice. Dozens of redcaps and madcaps are scurrying about as the Drunken Dragon approaches.
	+ The foreman of the plant is a redcap accompanied by two ravens that perch on his shoulders. One of the birds clutches an eyeball in its beak and the other has a severed human ear dangling by the lobe from its own.
	+ The foreman orders a dozen redcaps up onto the dam, all looking down at the party and their little ship.
	+ Then he asks the party what they got and the negotiations begin. The foreman is pretty keen to get a soul coin off the group but they don't have any. He soon orders the redcaps on the dam to light their molotov cocktails and ready to throw them at the Drunken Dragon, asking the group again, 'Wot you got?!'
	+ Pyt uses a mass suggestion spell to have all the threatening redcaps drop their incendiary bombs. The resulting fire kills them all atop the dam, save for two of the hardier, insaner madcaps that happened to be in their midst; that duo emerged on fire but singing and dancing, almost gleefully. They were eventually put out by a crowd of stomping redcap feet.
	+ Seeing no other path forward without hostilities, the party invoke their right to talk to Red Rona thanks to the ragdoll contract they have in their possession -- formally the properly of the MacLeod clan cultists. The foreman sends the two ravens onto the party's ship and then tells them that Rona can see and hear through the eye and ear the birds are holding. He insists the party say what they have to say quickly.
	+ This sudden turn wasn't part of the party's calculations. Pyt asks if there might be a way for Rona to speak back to them, to which the foreman reluctantly admits that if they'll have to come inside for that.
	+ And so the four of them disembark, fold up their magical boat, and walk through a crowd of jeering, manic redcaps as they follow the foreman inside.
	+ Aerendyl spots a trio of madcaps egging each other on. Two of them douse the third with the infernal liquor of their molotov cocktails. He's then set on fire and comes charging at the party, attempting to tackle the elf to the ground. As the madcap dies, he explodes in a gout of flame that singes all of them to some extent. The crowd cheers.
	+ The inside of the factory is a huge mess of metal and gears, with the odd torture chamber thrown around for good measure. The waters of the Styx are siphoned inside, processed, some secret ingredients are added, and eventually the illustrious Styx Juice is finished and bottled.
	+ The group are taken to the foreman's office, where he nails a severed tongue to the wall that allows Red Rona to speak to the group. She's fairly pleasant to them and is happy to honour the contract that lets them meet with her. She tells them to hold tight in the factory for several hours while she heads over - the foreman will find jobs for them.
		- Aerendyl spends his time in the form of an elk, running on a treadmill that's powering some conveyor belts.
		- Pyt's job is to poke a redcap held in a cage with a hot metal rod. Eventually the factor whistle sounds, the redcap lets themselves out the cage and another takes his place. Then Pyt can continue with the work.
		- Wilfred is set to cleaning a noodling mess of pipes. Refusing the filthy rags they offered him, he does so with his prestidigitation spell instead, successfully accomplishing the work of two people as a result.
		- This frees up Clwyd to spend her time waiting in the foreman's office. She's told to feed the birds and given the seeds. She opts to just chuck the seed on the floor. The birds reveal themselves to be imps that then go about picking the seed off the floor themselves. Clwyd chuckles to herself.
* Red Rona eventually arrives at the factory and ushers the group out the factory. Clwyd initially resists, demanding to know why they should go outside, saying she's got a lot of enemies and not a lot of power right now, so she's not to keen to head out without knowing what's going on. Rona shrugs and tells he that she's no safer in here than out there, and that it'll take too long to explain something she'd just understand if she walked out the door. When the hell hag leaves the building, the goblin reluctantly follows. The others go too. And waiting outside is Rona's creeping hut, a squat cottage-like building stood on thick spidery legs. Red Rona pats one of its legs a few times and speaks soothingly to the hut. It hunkers down and presents its porch in response.
	+ Rona ushers the others up and in, telling them not to mess with the cow as they go. And indeed, there is a foul, stinking catoblepas tied to the banister, its head down as it eats some gross, muddy porridge. Just walking near the thing and inhaling its nasty scent leaves Wilfred and Pyt feeling queasy for hours.
	+ Inside the hut is a masterclass in cramped, cluttered, and moribund organisation. The hell hag bangs on the wall a few times with her fist and the room lurches as the hut stands up and starts walking. Then Rona sits herself in a rocking chair, tells the group to make themselves some space on the floor somewhere, and then they get to the business of talking about what the party want and why they've asked for an audience with her.
	+ Rona pulls a large bullseye lantern onto her lap and points its opening at the party. Inside is a massive eye, easily the size of a human head. She tells them that it's just a little *anti-magic* to make an old woman feel safe with these strangers in her home.
	+ The negotiations are winding. The group make it clear that they want out of Hell, but Rona insists that leave-takings are a valuable thing in this place. They eventually agree that Rona will take them to a good crossing up from Mephistar to Dis. Then it's just a matter of settling the price for her to do this.
	+ As they talk, Rona recommends the group look out the window at one point. In the near distance, they see a true horde of infernal forces migrating across the hellish dunes, those winged devils among them blotting out the red-clouded sky as they swarmed. It was an unbelievable force to even look upon, let alone consider fighting through. This, Rona tells them, is Mephistopheles's entourage that accompanied him while he was running some errands outside his spire. Had the group continued their sailing, they would have had to pass by the horde somehow.
* Rona drives a hard bargain for her services. Originally, she requested five sensory organs from each of them, and slowly, they bring her asking price down.
	+ She gets the party to give her the ragdoll contract, such that it won't be used to demand her services again. In addition, they hand over their *flesh golem manual* and the inert *manual of bodily health.* And still that isn't everything!
	+ Consulting one of her many record books, Rona tells the party that there is a vampire named **Zadimus** who is being held and tortured on the Fourth Hell, in the subterranean prison below **Capo Bagrellan's estate**. The party are to go there and have the vampire freely give up one of his eyes, preserve it in jar filled with a custom concoction of Rona's design, and hand it over to her agent that she shall send with them. Rona intends to gain access to the legendary charm abilities of the vampires through ownership of the eye. She tells the party that she only needs the one, but if they can get both then she'll sweeten their deal considerably. In either case, the eyes must be freely given over by the vampire! This she insists, otherwise they're worthless.
	+ If the party leave the Fourth Hell without having given over one of Zadimus's eyes, then they default on the contract and one of the four of them owes Rona either both their eyes or one eye and one hand.
	+ Clwyd is sent up the small spiralling staircase to the small bedroom and rookery at the top of the hut. She picks out a raven from the dozen or so that were currently in residence -- a number of the fancy cages were empty -- and then heads back down to Rona and the others. The hell hag tells them this is an imp named Tenebrius who would be accompanying them and to whom they should hand the eyeball in the jar when they were done. She outfits Tenebrius with one of her eyes and a severed half-elf ear on a collar, then leaves the imp to enjoy himself in and about the hut before it was time for him to work.
* With the particulars sorted, Rona told the party that the journey to the passage from Mephistar to Dis would take the better part of two of their days. They would all need to find some ways to keep themselves occupied.
	+ Pretty soon after they concluded negotiations, the group settled in for must needed rest and sleep.
	+ On them waking up, Rona took some interest in Pyt's viol. It had previously been enchanted by infernal magics in the Telphousila household and Rona said it was good work. Should he be interested, she told him that she could add to the foundational work they'd done with some of her own magics. For this service, Rona has the party give her 7500gp worth of precious stones and platinum pieces. All the same, she gave the impression she made the offer just to have something interesting for her to work on while in the party's company. When she's finished, the viol is capable of casting a number of potent and interesting spells from it each day.
	+ While the party are making use of the *sending* spell to communicate with some people back in Terca Mahres, Rona tells them that Mephistopheles is capable of listening to any telepathic communication that happens on the Fifth Hell. At this, Wilfred recalls the feeling of someone eavesdropping on him when he'd used the *sending* spell previously. All the same, Aerendyl contacts Poppy through the necessary sending stone and tells her to ask Rangrim and Luciana if they could help get the party back from the Fourth Hell. Wilfred uses a couple of the spells to contact Snorri, one of the Sons of Ivaldi that he'd met on Tortuga. Wilfred tells the dwarf that Shandy has allied with goblins to take war to Svavil.
	+ After some more negotiating, Rona gives the group 7 days worth of food that won't be spoiled by the powers of the Hells. In exchange, they tell her everything they know about the Coven of Covens in Terca Mahres - with particular emphasis on the fact that most of them have been slain, and by the party themselves no less. Rona didn't seem overly interested in the happenings of Terca Mahres or Faerie, but she'd agreed to hear what they had to say and when they're done telling, she fished out an big, tattered grimoire and started leafing through it. It took her a while to find the page she wanted - she appeared to leaf through many more pages than the thickness of the book suggested it should have - and read from it for their benefit:
		- The Coven of Covens was formed at the end of the 3rd Time of Madness, a Time that had been defined by battles for control over water.
		- The Coven of Covens was charged with maintaining an intricate, powerful seal to a pseudo-realm known as the Underdeep.
		- The beast contained seemed to have sought out Terca Mahres for its bountiful, fecund Wild, but it seemed incapable of coexistence in any way. It was alien and incomprehensible, powerful beyond belief, and parasitic in nature and practice. Its intention was always to flood the world for its own purposes. Faerie scholars concluded that it sought out Terca Mahres to reproduce.
		- The creature sealed in the Underdeep, that the party's actions had all but set free, was known as the Kraken.
	+ After their second sleep in Hell, Wilfred spends some time talking to one of Red Rona's sister. To do this he takes a fanged, humanoid skull into his lap, closes his eyes, and imagines himself in a room with a pleasant older lady. And so he finds himself. Rona's sister looks much like her, only with less weathered skin and a much more portly frame. She's pleasant and intelligent, and guides Wilfred in the subtle art of shaping the dreamlike space they were together experiencing. She offers him *shoom*, a sherbet-like delicacy from a long forgotten age, and he offers her Spice Town's finest *kaf*. They talk on the nature of the fey, the party's dealing with the River King, and the approach that he might take to life should the Coven of Coven's seal be broken.
* As the fatigue starts weighing on them enough to indicate they must be approaching their third night in Hell, huge basalt cliffs rose to the hellish heavens out the window. Red Rona tells them they were almost to the place where the party would disembark, a set of stairs carved into the cliffs that lead to a door to the Fourth Hell.