Investigations Across the City

Session Summary: 06/18/2023

Ahhhh, a day of RESEARCH and shadows! With the Bone House as their next objective and a need to enter it prepared rather than ignorant, the heroes divided their efforts across Lepidstadt. Charles submerged himself in the university's library, pulling obscure texts on the Dreamlands and the City of Nod. What he found there disturbed him profoundly. The City of Nod sat on a black lake in the Dreamlands themselves, and the black sand that had been spreading through Poiana's aquifer and appearing in the toy-hearts bore the same magical signature as the city's foundations in every ancient account that mentioned it. The connection was not incidental. Something from the City of Nod, or something that DREW its power from it, was operating in Lepidstadt.

Diana spent her hours running methodical experiments on the black sandstone heart recovered from the teddy bear. She confirmed that the heart was a manufactured artifact, not a natural formation, constructed from Morpheus' Tears using techniques that required both significant skill and intimate knowledge of dream-energy dynamics. When she pressed it against her palm and opened her perception carefully, she felt the heart drinking. The gossamer substance of dreams flowed into it and out of it, out toward somewhere, leaking at a rate she could measure but not yet trace.

Kiren worked her contacts in the less legitimate quarters of the city, building a picture of the Bone House: exotic clientele, peculiar wagers, the proprietor Mortimer Totenspieler who had been operating the establishment for decades, and Andreii von Dragffy whose gambling visits had become a near-nightly affair in recent months. She also turned up more family gossip about the Five Great Families, the Pendergrast clan's displacement of the Baumgartners eighteen years prior, and whispers of a raven-haired porcelain doll that Gregor Pendergrast had carried everywhere until very recently.

Mutu spent the day in atonement for a transgression involving a replacement scarecrow on the previous journey to Lepidstadt, a transgression that Sarenrae had evidently not let slide. The specifics involved a destroyed scarecrow, a falsehood, and a lesson about the CONSEQUENCES of dishonesty that would have been funnier if the divine displeasure had not been so pointed. They reconvened at the inn with a clearer picture of what they were walking into at the Bone House!