So after Rasmus killed himself in the death explosion of the soul-stealing swamp rock elf daemon and his son Remus was confined to the Sanatorium due to black ooze infection a sack of gold and xp was sent to Rasmus’ begrudged and estranged daughter Raeleigh, who sighed, bought herself some swords to hit things, and hopped on the next boat to New Feierland.

 

 

And she didn’t even die or anything. Here’s her diary.

 

 

DAY ONE

 

Well I’m here, the attendant nurse at the Baron Blixa Von Apfelsaft of Barovia and Barovania Center For The Amelioration of Unspeakable Afflictions handed over the Sabatons of Shame with barely a grunt, she says Remus is doing well,  I tried not to laugh in her wrinkled old face.

These people my father and brother have been running around with are about as sketchy as I expected, and their first thought for making some coin was a reward being offered for the “Insane Fletcher” who came back from a party and decided to stop making arrows and start snatching people in the dark and eating their faces. What a wonderful place this is.

His son knew nothing and was ugly besides but Captain Fat Michael of what passes for the guard told us a little about the pattern of snatchings. One of these guys ran off to a school to get the kids to make rape whistles and we never saw him again. The rest of us went out that night with a plan to disguise the ugly wizard as a bent old man to use as bait while the rest of us hid on rooftops. After skulking around in the rain for hours all we got for our trouble was a run-in with some overly friendly soused sailors and a child-sized rat thing that stole chalk from the wizard.

So while Blixa of the aforementioned sanatorium is squeezing down a hole after the rat-thing and the big guy in the armour is falling off roofs the Fletcher comes out of the shadows and hugs the wizard to him, crooning in his ear and dragging him screaming back into the shadows.

 

And when I say into the shadows, I mean in to the shadows, the fucking guy was hanging from a shadow on the wall.

 

The wizard, Valentine I think it is, let off the Light spell he was conjuring which threw the Fletcher out of the wall with no more shadow to hold him, but he ran off and disappeared behind a crate before anyone could get to him.

Valentine flew off wearing some kind of hoodoo glasses that detect magic then came back rambling about a shadow trail leading to the sewers. The boys argued for a while about who should go in first until I told them to go to bed so we can come back tomorrow night and set a trap instead of wandering into the cold dark sewer full of rat people and shadow jumpers. This is the kind of shit that got my father killed and my brother committed and me dragged to this damp hellhole. Goodnight diary.

 

 

DAY TWO

 

Blixa disappeared to do some kind of secret thief thing so it was just me, Valentine, and Beefy McBeeferson left to track down the Insane Fletcher. Joy.

Since this guy seems useless without his shadows I figured the easiest thing to do would be to lure him out of the sewers with some pathetic looking bait, stun him with sudden light, then hit him with swords until he was dead. No fuss, no muss.

 

So, bait.

 

We went back to the rape whistle school and picked out a particularly poorly looking little girl. The teacher actually bought my spiel about Fat Michael sending us to train a child how to protect themselves better from the Fletcher so that they can teach the rest of the children, but wouldn’t let us take the girl without her parent’s permission. Good luck kids, your teacher’s an idiot. I bluffed that her parents Dick and Sally Shitwater already said it’s fine because it sounded like a characteristically New Feierland name to me, and sure enough she looks at her list and there’s Charlie and Sacha Shitwater. I explained that we go way back which is why I call them by nicknames, and she smiles and says of course just make sure he’s with us when we pick her up after school, and I smile and thank her very much.

 

So, shit, now we have to find out what Dick Shitwater looks like so the wizard can use his Disguise spell to look like him to pick up the little girl for bait to catch the Fletcher.

 

We went to Cooper’s tavern and found out that Dick Shitwater is a scribe that does commissions writing scrolls for people all over town, and heard some bullshit about dragons and shadow elf kings from some prancy mage called Francisco of the Cosmos the Magnificent or some such stupid shit. The idiot tried to get in my pants by offering to tell me more boring stories and conjuring a flower, so I slapped him, dropped the flower on the floor, let spit drool out of my mouth onto it while staring at him, and left.

This guy that wears all the armour, Radomir, complained that it would be easier to just hire an orphan, so I told him to run off and try his luck while I kept asking around after Dick Shitwater. Soon enough I’ve got Dick Shitwater’s address and Radomir comes back mumbling something about a marine chasing him away from the docks for trying to solicit young boys. Yeah, good job champ.

Dick Shitwater wasn’t home though, just his wife who was really, creepily intent on having us come in for tea, but I was having none of that. Telling her that we had a big commission for her husband got her to tell us that he was up at Lord Suchinson’s estate writing scrolls though.

 

So, Lord Suchinson, biggest lands in New Feierland, dumbest guards. When we finally got there I told the guards that we heard their Lord was looking to hire more militia for his fabulous lands which are so very vast and that we would like an audience, and soon enough they’re mumbling about job boards and people being eaten by elf lizards at farms and their captain Winston-Smith comes down from the house flicking his pooncy white hair in the rain. He was really excited that we wanted to work at the farm but wasn’t going to let us into the house until Valentine started recommending herbs to make his hair more beautiful, which made him invite us right in for tea. What is with this place and tea.

He took us to a sitting room where I faked sipping tea until I excused myself to the restroom, you know, from all the tea I was enjoying. He insisted a maid called Dorothy escort me though, so I made girl chat with the daft young thing and convinced her to give me a tour since she wouldn’t leave me to find my own way back from the restroom. She showed me the dining room where “they sit on chairs and everything” and showed me this amazing thing they eat from called a bowl that “isn’t made from mud or wood or anything” and this thing called a spoon that’s like a smaller bowl thing but on a stick! I tried to get her to take me to her Lord so that I could tell him how amazing his house is and what a good job she was doing but she just prattled on about how hot Winston-Smith is, so I changed tact and asked her about scrolls but that only made her ramble about how they somehow take the ink from a squid and put it on paper. I told her that was amazing and that I would really like to see one, and the minute she left the room went back into the hallway and up the stairs.

 

I found the room they were in easy enough and tried to deliver a message through the door that Dick Shitwater’s wife had taken an awful fall after an incident with the tea and that he should come right away, but the prick Lord locked the door on me then some burly guard came out and shoved me back into the hallway when I kept calling out. Then more guards came up from the stairs and started nodding wisely at each other about the “Wanderlust” I was afflicted with until they took me back to Valentine who gave me my “herbal treatment”.

Apparently Winston-Smith half fired Dorothy when she told him she’d lost me but Valentine hand-waved it as the awful Wanderlust Disorder, and these dupes actually believed it and all started using the term like it was a real thing and asked me to talk to Dorothy about it because they think she might have a touch of it herself. He got so enamoured with us that he invited us to stay for more tea and have dinner with Lord Suchinson after Dick Shitwater left, but well, we had places to be and little girls to use as bait. We could hear Dick Shitwater saying his goodbyes in the hallway soon enough so I faked a Wanderlust attack, ran into the hallway calling to Valentine for assistance, then as soon as he’d had a good look ran out of the house screaming “Wanderlust!”

These people, I swear. No wonder their town is so shitty.

 

By the time we got back into town it was night, school was out, and our bait had gone home.

 

We tried to hire a few drunks and orphans with gold and booze but had absolutely no takers. For a place so miserable and poverty-stricken these fuckers sure are picky about how they make their money.

While Radomir tried to tell us about his sexual encounter with Winston-Smith, Valentine cast a spell of Invisibility on all of us so that we could stake out the sewer and the cemetery while he flew over the town looking for signs of the Fletcher. Haha my father would be so mad if he knew I let a wizard do that to me, he fucking hated magic, but then, he’s dead.

But come sunrise, I hadn’t seen anything and Valentine was all upset about losing a passed-out drunk he was keeping an eye on. Whatever, time to sleep.

 

 

DAY THREE

 

Okay, so yesterday didn’t quite turn out as planned, but at least we’d seen Dick Shitwater so that Valentine could cast a spell to look like him so that we could collect his daughter after school and use her as bait to catch the Insane Fletcher.

And so we go down near the school and Valentine pulls out his book to prepare the spell, then looks up at me and says that it won’t actually let him turn into a specific person.

 

Yah, after all that, the wizard remembers he can’t perform his part of the plan. Maybe dad wasn’t so wrong about these creeps after all.

 

The boys started formulating a new plan to use some Charm spell to con the little girl into coming with us anyway, but I suggested that maybe, just maybe, since we can’t actually pretend to be this girl’s father after all and we’re out in a public place maybe we should just go use this spell on some loner since that is a thing that we can do. And apparently always could.

 

I tried to convince an old man in an alley that he was my senile grandfather and that it was his birthday and that we’d organised a party for him by the sewer, but he just kept yelling about the fact that he was 71 and that it’s always raining here unlike in Old Feierland where it had two seasons and in one of them it didn’t rain all the time and that is the main difference between Old Feierland and New Feierland. Valentine cast his Charm spell and convinced the old guy to come with us but he still kept talking about how it’s always raining. We also realised that we were still invisible from the night before and he apparently didn’t have a problem talking to disembodied voices.

We set him up with a bottle of hooch and a crate chair by the sewer and set up to wait for the Fletcher to come out at nightfall, and asked the old coot to keep telling us about the main difference between Old Feierland and New Feierland.

When he started complaining about being 71 and it’s always raining again I grabbed some scrap from an alley and made a little shelter for him, but I guess some of the yokels saw because next thing some guards showed up and started accusing him of being the focal point of some elf activity like talking to things that aren’t there and having shelters built from nothing. While the guards were knocking down the old man’s shelter Valentine tried to write a message from god on the wall with rotten fruit to make them leave him alone, but the illiterate fucks thought it was more elf activity and threw swords at the wall while dragging the old man away to the Sanatorium to be confined and interrogated about elves.

They stole our goddamn bait.

 

Valentine got the idea into his head to find a fresh-ish corpse to set up on the crate chair, so we went over to the mortuary, which was locked, but the tool shed wasn’t. The wizard got himself inside and started banging things around until the mortician came out, tricked him into the shed, and took his keys.

The boys ran inside and stuffed the freshest corpse they could find into a sack and made it Invisible before running back out, and we scurried back off to the sewer while the mortician told the guards all about the floating voices that stole his keys and broke into the open mortuary.

 

So while Valentine ran off to find some scabby clothes I pulled this corpse out of the sack and made it slap Radomir to shake off its Invisbility, and it’s a 73 year old woman with great big bruises on her head and hips, about two days fresh. Nice one.

Valentine dressed her up and we propped her on the chair with Radomir, still Invisible, heaving her shoulders like she’s sobbing and moving her hands around, intermittently commenting that it’s always raining while Valentine flew above and I stood by with sharp things to stick into the Fletcher.

 

Hours pass. No Fletcher but two drunk young louts walk by and notice our sobbing old woman bait out in the rain by the sewer and start talking like they’re going to do something about that but I am not losing my bait again, so I shout at them that I’m 73 years old and it’s always raining and I can take care of myself because I’m 73 years old go away now thank you very much it’s always raining until they do, in fact, go away thank you very much.

More hours pass, only a few away from sunrise, and Radomir starts to lose it, sobbing a little himself while he heaves this old woman’s shoulders up and down and begs us to let him stop, but I just tell him what a good job he’s doing and promise that the Fletcher will be here soon and then he can stop. Damned if I’m getting down there with the bait.

And then the sun comes up. And we’ve spent the whole night invisible in the rain by a sewer shaking an old woman’s corpse around like a puppet and we never saw the goddamn Fletcher.

 

We went through a lot to get that bait so I wasn’t going to just leave it, so the boys got on either side of her to make it look like she was walking, kicking the backs of her legs as they went until we ran into a couple of bakers with a cart full of fresh bread. Valentine grabbed the old woman’s arm and moved it towards the cart asking for a sample and two grown men went white and ran away screaming, throwing loaves of bread at a dead woman.

While I was picking up the bread the boys decided they wanted to take her to church, so they ran over there and started banging on the door but the nun that opened it looked like she was in worse shape than the bait and couldn’t see well enough to recognise a corpse. The priest she called over did though. He started screaming about the undead rising and threw holy water in our bait’s face, so I yelled “oh it’s raining again!” and then he grabbed an axe and shattered her head. The boys nearly dropped her but Radomir kept her upright and I started chastising the priest about respecting his elders because I’m 73 thank you very much. A whole bunch of brains and shit was splattering everywhere so the boys dropped her, the priest hacking at the corpse while we ran away, calling “it’s always raining!”

 

I really need some sleep, I’ve been up playing with an old woman’s corpse in the rain all night, goodnight diary.

 

 

 

And that’s how a Carbuncle survived New Feierland.

With the sack of xp she was sent and all the Terrible Plans conceived in her first few days, she might even reach level 2 before the next game.

GOD WILLING