Through the Sewers to Pendergrast Manor

Session Summary: 09/10/2023

Ahhhh, an entrance both UNDIGNIFIED and absolutely necessary! On the morning of Gregor's grand concert, with the city already alive with the particular excitement that exclusive musical events generate among the wealthy and their resentful observers, the heroes followed the Toymaker's precise directions through the sewers beneath the Lepidstadt streets. The architecture of the city's underground waste management was, in Dr. Ritalsin's words, a testament to Lepidstadt's civic ambitions. In the heroes' experience it was dark, cold, smelled exactly as expected, and contained one Otyugh standing between them and their objective.

The Otyugh was a massive creature of tentacles and teeth and extraordinary digestive capability that had established residence in the particular junction where the Toymaker's documents indicated the hidden manor entrance could be found. Kiren and Diana conducted the negotiation. The specifics of what was offered and accepted in exchange for unobstructed passage are, by general agreement of all parties involved, not to be included in any official record. The Otyugh was satisfied. The heroes passed. Eye contact was avoided for the remainder of the evening.

The hidden entrance opened into a room that stopped them cold. It was designed to simulate night sky, an indoor garden of sorts, but wrong in its specific wrongness: a nocturnal floral studio where flowers that only bloomed under moonlight opened in the artificial starlight, their scents too heavy, their colors too vivid in the lamplight, their arrangement suggesting not aesthetic pleasure but PURPOSE. Every petal felt like it was listening. Every shadow held the potential of having been placed deliberately rather than having fallen naturally.

Geist, from his position on Kiren's pack, offered a single word of assessment that the heroes found deeply unhelpful and entirely accurate. They pressed forward. The manor was quiet above them; the concert preparations were keeping Gregor and his household staff occupied elsewhere in the building. The underground spaces were theirs to explore, at least until they made a noise that changed the situation. Charles noticed a mechanism in the floral studio's southern wall. He pointed it to Kiren, who studied it and found the activation sequence.

She triggered it. The wall peeled back. The heroes looked at what lay beyond. The word for what they experienced in that moment was not horror exactly, though horror was present. It was closer to the specific weight of CONFIRMATION, of finding exactly the thing you had been dreading you would find, laid out in front of you without ambiguity!