In which our friends’ search for the missing Dr. Giuliani brings them to the epicentre of a mysterious plague.
Monday 22 October
Where’s Doctor Giuliani?
The adventurers made their plans over breakfast at the Crayfish inn. Marike and Courage had helped Anya von Reuter find an apartment to rent and somewhere she could offer her stuff for sale, so she’d be busy with that for the next few days.
While Marike stayed in the room with her field lab to brew a new batch of healing elixirs, Aenlinn, Kethe and Wernhart/Bernhard headed first to the address they got for the missing Doctor Alessandra Giuliani: Harzert’s cheese shop, just a few blocks away from the Crayfish.
The cheese shop, like most shops in the cities of the Empire where city plots are taxed according to their street frontage, was a tall and narrow building – three stories and an attic. Herr Harzert, a gaunt, sad-faced man, confirmed that the doctor had been renting his garret for a few months now, and that she had been gone a couple of days, but this was not unusual – she’d paid the next month’s rent already so she probably wasn’t going to leave. Aenlinn and Kethe bought some cheese before moving on.
* * *
The next stop was the Hospital of the Nurturer, located in the slums in the western part of town, on the other side of the river. Ther were ferries to take across the water, but the adventurous took a walk along the docks crossed the great bridge.
Dropping a few coins into the donation box, they stepped into the hospital and asked a young novice for the Doctor. The novice turned out to be Kai, an old acquaintance of Aenlinn, who had known her as a local street urchin and trickster. Aenlinn asked what the hell she was doing here; she replied something cryptic about it actually partly being Aenlinn’s fault – last time they met, something happened that made her rethink what she wanted to do with her life. After some catching up, Kai confirmed that Dr. Giuliani had indeed been here and that she was last seen on her way to the Spittelfeld slums, seemingly to be the center of the spread of the infection that had ravaged the western city in recent weeks, to investigate the disease more closely. Kai managed to get an address from one of the older sisters: Sackgasse 3, locally known as “the Rookery”.
The Spittelfeld Rookery
The house turned out to live up to its nickname: it was a bizarre six-story stack of ramshackle apartments, piled atop one another seemingly at random. There were lights in some of the windows, but many others were dark. The top floor had some sort of open balcony or patio, and the adventurers caught a glimpse of a white-haired man in long turquoise robes looking down from it before disappearing inside. A sign next to the front door read, “LODGINGS – 2 pennies a night.”
They went into the front hallway. The caretaker turned out to be another old acquaintance of Aenlinn’s – “Kleine” Jan, a giant of a man, seemingly trying in vain to look smaller. He was clearly not very bright, but he could confirm Dr. Giuliani was here. She came here and rented a room the other day, but by this morning she had gotten sick herself! Jan showed them up to the room she had rented on the third floor.
The sickbed of Doctor Giuliani
The Doctor was indeed in a bad way; she was lying on a stained cot, barely conscious. She sweated profusely, turning the sheets a translucent gray. Her eyes were glassy and her face is grey-pale. She was so weak she wasn’t even coughing, just wheezing faintly deep in her chest.
She weakly beckoned the adventurers over and said, “La verita… mio diario… my… diary…” Then she passed out and couldn’t be stirred. Wernhart knew enough Classical to realise she wanted to say something about “the truth” and her diary. While Wernhart examined the Doctor herself, Aenlinn and Kethe searched around for the diary; they found a bag under the bed containing some personal effects but no diary. Wernhart found that in addition to a high fever, she had large, dark bruises on her left forearm and wrist, almost like she ruptured a blood vessel.
Kethe thought she caught a glimpse of someone peeping at them from a hole in the wall. There turned out to be a cramped crawl space someone seemed to have moved through.
While Kethe tried to squeeze her way through the narrow, dirty crawlspace – she had to give up after a while, but did discover it had openings towards the stairwell, and there were similar ventilation hatches on each floor – Aenlinn met a couple of curious neighbours and talked to them a bit. She – and Wernhart, who eventually joined them – learned that:
- The doctor was always writing in her diary, She carried it with her except when she slept, when she used to keep it in her bag.
- If someone had rummaged through the bag – they hadn’t seen anything themselves, of course, but they could imagine – it wouldn’t surprise them if it was little Dreiecke who nicked them. “One of Zangvogel’s orphans, a light-fingered little rascal.”
- “The first to die of the disease was Argus Finkel, here on the third floor. Died four weeks back. A shame, really. He used to sing the finest songs. Then one day he got all bruised and swollen, his eyes bugged out, and he died the day after.”
- About four people a day had fallen ill. “I’ve seen worse plagues in my life, but it ain’t good.”
Imprisoned!
As they were talking, there was suddenly a great noise and commotion downstairs and outside; people shouting and arguing angrily, and the sound of hammers hitting wood.
The house had been surrounded by watchmen and soldiers from the garrison, who were nailing the doors and windows on the ground floor shot as crossbowmen and handgunners covered the upstairs windows. After the doors and windows were boarded up, the guards fell back a bit as white-robed novices and nuns from the Order of the Caregiver began to set up a cordon sanitaire of stakes linked together with white cloth; a line that must not be crossed due to the risk of infection.
“Kleine” Jan roared angrily at the door as the scared and confused tenants were milling about and talking over each other. An officer outside called out that, “Sackgasse 3 is under complete quarantine by order of the Magistrate and the Grand Prince. No one enters or leaves until the plague spreading from here has stopped!”
The adventurers found themselves trapped in the house with the tenants. Kethe thought it might be possible to find a way to sneak out, but they began by continuing their research – now most immediately trying to track down the missing diary of Doctor Giuliani.
Zangvogel’s Orphanage
They started out by looking for the orphanage supposedly in the house, where the aforementioned light-fingered child might be found.
The orphanage took up half of the third and fourth floors of the Rookery (much of the intervening ceiling having fallen in long ago). The walls and remaining floors were peeling and damaged but surprisingly clean.
The head of the orphanage was Annieke Zangvogel, a strongly-built middle-aged woman with a Westerlander accent. She was very protective of “her” children and wary about adventurers’ snooping, but after they finally managed to convince her of their good intentions, she admitted that Dreiecke had a habit of nicking things and then hiding them. She offered to help them in exchange for a favour: several of the children were ill (not with this plague, thank goodness, but ordinary fevers and the like) and needed medicine. She suspected that the Vadimovich brothers upstairs – petty criminals of Kislevite extraction – might be hiding some medical supplies – she heard them bragging about robbing an apothecary not long ago. If the adventurers could get her medicine for the children, she promised to make sure Dreiecke returned the book, if he had it.
The Vadimovich brothers
The door to the brothers’ apartment was reinforced and locked. Aenlinn convinced Jan to bring his keys up, but as they approached the door was flung open and they were confronted by a furious and apparently very drunk Georgiy Vadimovich, brandishing a loaded blunderbuss. After they calmed him down enough to stop pointing the gun at them, he grumbled that his brother Yurtak had disappeared, and accused the “sorcerer” on the top floor of being behind it. The adventurers tried to reason with him; he admitted he “might” have some medicines and might agree to hand them over if the adventurers helped him find his brother.
Before going upstairs to talk to the “sorcerer”, they checked into the other rooms on the floor just in case and lo and behold, Yurtak was lying unconscious in an adjacent room. He turned out to have ruptured blood vessels in his forearm… The brother was dragged back to his room, where he had to sit down and get something (strong) to drink.
Georgiy dug out a small chest of apothecary supplies from a triply-locked safe room and handed it over, then grabbed an axe and headed upstairs, raving and cursing in Gospodar.
Wernhart took the opportunity to examine Yurtak. No visible wounds… but the symptoms were similar to Blood Rot, an often fatal blood poisoning sometimes occurring with aggravated wound infections.
However, Blood Rot is not contagious. Something was off about this. And look! A couple of tiny marks appeared to be in the middle of the bruise. A bite? Not illness – but poisoning?
The Doctor’s diary
Annieke, very grateful for the medicine, soon got hold of little Dreicke and kindly but firmly told him to hand over the book. He scurried off, dug it out of hiding and handed it over.
* * *
However, reading the notes was easier said than done; the handwriting was atrocious even if it hadn’t been written in Tilean. None of the adventurers read Tilean, but Wernhart, who knew the related Classical tongue, did his best to decipher the last few pages of notes.
He manages to figure out about half of them and came up with:
- All the victims the doctor had examined had bite marks in arteries or major blood vessels. Despite the lack of open wounds, they seemed to have lost a lot of blood.
- Theory: one or more creatures, themselves carriers of the blood infection, have bitten the victims, drank their blood and thus “poisoned” them with the blood rot. This was followed by a page with only the word Vampiro? written on it.
- The “contagion” indeed seemed to be centered on this house. Probably the vampire – or whatever it was – was hiding somewhere in the house.
This all fit quite well with Wernhart’s own findings, but he was determined to decipher the rest of the final notes.
Could there be a vampire – or something – among the tenants? The adventurers asked Jan whether anyone was newly arrived in the house when the sickness began four weeks ago, but he shook his head – all the tenants, except for single-night lodgers, had been here longer than that, most of them much longer.
The adventurers asked Annieke about this “sorcerer” upstairs. She told them he was called Elu, and he was a bit of an oddball. He’d been living here for years, but he was said to have travelled all over the world in his younger days. She had no idea whether he actually had any magical powers, but that was one of the many rumours about him. Either way, he mostly kept to himself and rarely bothered anyone.
The eccentric Elu
The adventurers headed up to the top floor and persuade a now rather winded Georgiy, who had been yelling threats and abuse at the mute and well-reinforced door for some time, to go home and look after his brother instead. Once he was gone, they knocked and were let in by the mysterious Elu.
He was tall and thin, with long white hair and a complexion so pale you might mistake him for an albino but for his eyes, which were pale green rather than red. He wore a long blue silk robe embroidered with dragon-like patterns.
Elu’s apartment was a mess of discarded silken garments, broken china and other faded memories of finery. Arranged haphazardly around the apartment were objects and souvenirs from all the corners of the world: fans and figurines from Xong-Huo, woodcuts from Nippon, patterned carpets from Arawiya and the Silk Road, elephant embroideries from Ind or Kuresh, and painted masks and drums from the Southlands. There were also bookshelves here with books in all manner of languages - including Tilean. It was surprisingly bright in here, with several windows letting the sunlight in.
The adventurers’ host received them with absent-minded politeness, offering them tea and fine brandy served on expensive – although chipped – crockery from the Far East. He was a bit vague about how long he had lived in the house – “it’s been a few years now”. He didn’t seem to have much of a clue about what was going on outside and he looked like he’d seen better days, but he didn’t seem to be sick.
He asked whether they had any theories about what was going on; it turned out he had spoken to Alessandra Giuliani, who had mentioned being onto something similar. He quite liked the young doctor, mentioning approvingly how nice it was to come across someone who had also read the old poets.
The adventurers were not at all sure they could trust Elu, but they finally asked him to help them translate the Doctor’s diary. He readily agreed; reading it, he chuckled appreciatively at the doctor’s fine prose style and witty observations. In addition to what Wernhart had already deciphered, the important points among the last few notes were:
- The plague was not a contagion transmitted from patient to patient. All the patients had been infected by their blood being poisoned.
- The poisoner could use the crawlspaces between the walls to move unseen in the house.
- Unless it was hiding in plain sight as one of the tenants, the most likely hiding place was in the basement, a veritable labyrinth.
After some more chatting – Elu realized at least Kethe seemed to suspect he was the vampire, which amused rather than offending him – he wished them the best of luck before gently but firmly ushering them out of his apartment and barricading himself inside. Kethe glanced at the ventilation hatches on the top floor; they were untouched.
It seemed only the basement was left to explore now…
The Enemy Within: Remixed 
Sounds fun! Looking forward to what happens in the basement…
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