Sunday, December 25, 2022

It's Christmastime

• Declan's Christmas is spent in the following way:
  • After the fight, he heads home to the freehold and settles in with a dram of whisky and cooks some cheap steaks that for Bran, Puter, Benjamin, and Potato (and Grif if he's about) for Christmas dinner
  • Christmas morning he leaves the freehold and calls Paddy on Christmas morning to wish him and Cinnamon a happy Christmas and check in on how their trip is going
    • It goes to voicemail
  • After that he musters up as many winter coats as he can by ringing round some of his contacts to raid lost and found boxes or things they have set aside for donation, and takes them around to The Hill (large homeless encampment off Buford Highway in Buckhead area) to give out
• Blaze gifts me an autograph from Johanna Skarsgard
• The rest of the motley trickles into the freehold at various point on Christmas night

Legends of the Hidden Temple

• After listening to Agnes do a reading of the Christmas Carol and drinking a lot of spiked hot chocolate, we decide to set out through the bunkhouse room doors into what we assume is central America
  • My supplies consist of a Crown Royal bag of sand (in case we need to Temple of Doom it) and some bottled water (because if it's Mexico, you're not supposed to drink the water)
• We come out into a dusty stone room, covered in spider webs and just as the door closes we see a large troll woman who tries to get us to stop the door from closely
  • Her name is Brigid, and she's absolutely the troll we saw in our vision (and is a basketball player that we saw mentioned as having gone missing in a news article)
    • She has been trapped here since Halloween
    • She remembers being chased by vampires but not much else, since it was Samhaine
  • She tells me someone with the same accent as me is here with his girlfriend and her kid
    • I confirm it's Paddy and Cinnamon (Tiara)
    • They've gone off looking for a way out
  • She says there are several other people here, and the longer they're here they start going crazy (accumulating Nightmare)
    • Brigid tells us she's been able to keep it at bay once she took an oath to get everyone out, so long as she's working towards that goal
  • There are rooms where food shows up, and there are beds but they don't seem to need to sleep as time is weird here
  • Vampires show up, but they try and chase them out
    • She's pretty sure the vampires here are the ones that were chasing her, and followed her in and they got trapped too
  • There are also evidently challenges
    • A maze
    • Traps of some sort
    • Piranha infested waters
• We meet Anikha and Basti, a British woman and a Latino kid (around 9)
  • She says something about needing to catalog any artifacts we have found
    • She says she works for the British Museum and says the temple is Mayan and is at least 500 years old
  • He is scared of the door
• I have a recollection of a past life where I totally got trapped in a place like this and finally wandered out 10 years later, totally made
• Agnes is certain this is a Lost One freehold
  • Lost Ones are true fae that didn't want to become changelings, and so made their own little pocket dimension and pulled in the rug behind them, essentially becoming the freehold itself
  • She's never heard of one where there would be traps and whatnot like this, and the timeline feels weird for this
• We hear sex noises coming from down one side passage
  • Brigid says that's probably just Chloe and Rodrigo again (they're both consenting adults)
• We check the "entrance" door, and definitely get the feeling like it should lead up to another level but opens up onto a misty void
• We go back to where we came in and Agnes tries to use Soothsay to find Paddy, who Brigid said he went off across the water there
  • She uses some of my blood to forge the connection
• We find Paddy, Tiara, and her son Marco, and a woman named Leni who was an unauthorized haunted tour guide
• We stumble upon a vampire and yeet him into a black void of a door
  • I have a past life memory of losing a mate that went into one
  • Brigid and Agnes realize this is an opening onto a Black Path of Balor, which leads into the Shadowlands
    • These aren't supposed to manifest in a freehold, but would be something you'd encounter deeper into the Dreaming
    • Our best guess is that this freehold is set as deep into the Dreaming as it could be without being totally disconnected from the mundane world
• Moira and Blaze both find circular necklaces with Aztec designs inside some pots
• Half the party (Blaze, Agnes, Aoife) makes it across a series of jumpy stones and find an altar that as they approach erupts with a balefire
  • Within the flames is a bearded male form (Don Alvaro de la Noche, a boggan) who speaks in archaic Spanish
  • He welcomes them to the end of his maze, the center of his domain
  • Evidently there were clues and explanations he left along the way, documenting his expedition to this new land
• He was part of a plan to hide the keys so the Fomorians can't open the triumph casque of sorrows
  • He says the true fae buried under Rome is probably Count Odo
  • He also says he was one of the founders of the Changeling way, binding himself to a Spanish nobleman
• We take copies of the inscriptions of the sarcophagi

• We collect the texts de la Noche left