Fantasms in the Streets and Oleksandra Freed

Session Summary: 08/20/2023

Ahhhh, the waking world and the dream world continue their COLLISION! Armed with the sacred paints from the Cairn and Gunther's ritual circle instructions, the heroes set out for the Baumgartner residence to attempt freeing Oleksandra from her black sand coma. The route through Lepidstadt's streets offered an unexpected detour.

Two women walked ahead of them in the evening crowds: one young, one in her thirties but presenting younger through the arts of cosmetics. With their new dream-sight, the heroes saw a creature attached to the older woman's gossamer stream, a Fantasm feeding on the chaotic emotional energy she was generating. The thing should not have been visible in the waking world at all, but the boundary between realms had worn thin enough in Lepidstadt for such entities to persist during daylight hours. The heroes destroyed the creature, but when the women fled into a side alley, they followed and found themselves in the middle of an attempted mugging. The confrontation ended with Corina von Toma dead at the muggers' feet.

And then Corina's body did something TERRIBLE. Her heart tore itself from her chest with a wet crack, her flesh desiccated in seconds, and the corpse twisted into the shape of a monstrous undead spider-creature that lunged at the nearest warm body with horrible speed. They destroyed it, and from Corina's companion Elena von Luca they learned the sad mundane explanation beneath the supernatural horror: Corina had been using beauty cosmetics purchased from Eliza von Balory to appear younger and attract Andreii von Dragffy's attention. The cosmetics had been laced with Morpheus' Tears. She had been beautiful and thin and sleepless for months, her dreams and her vitality both draining away, until there was nothing left to sustain a natural death.

At the Baumgartner mansion, they performed the ritual and freed Oleksandra at last. The girl woke with the vivid clarity of someone recently imprisoned and described her experience: a furious little girl who wanted to grow up, trapped in a child's body, burning with hatred for the Five Families and particularly Gregor Pendergrast. She wanted to HURT them, Oleksandra said. She wanted to use Gregor to reclaim what had been taken from her. Bessenne von Balory. They now had a name for the trapped soul at the center of Gregor's obsession!