S4E9: Slaughter in Spittelfeld, Part II – I Don’t Wanna Go Down to the Basement

Full version in Swedish

In which our friends get to the bottom of the strange illness ravaging the Spittelfeld quarters.

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Monday, October 22^nd

The Rookery in Spittelfeld (Art from Ubersreik Adventures)

The maze in the cellar

The adventurers began gearing up for their expedition into the basement. They borrowed a load of wax candles and some rags to wrap around too-exposed necks; they also talked Georgiy Vadimovich into lending them a hooded lantern. His brother Yurtak tried to volunteer to join the expedition, but he still couldn’t even stand without help.

Georgiy Vadimovich (by unknown artist)

Yurtak Vadimovich (by unknown artist)

The cellar stairs

They descended into the pitch-dark basement, which turned out to be a labyrinth of rubble: piles of old rags, old mattresses, crates and crates of no-doubt spoiled goods, loose rusty nails and other unpleasantness. The rats were well fed and barely bothered to get out of their way.

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Picking a direction more or less at random, they turned right from the stairs and started looking east. Kethe, who still didn’t like the dark at all, put down lit candles here and there along the way so they wouldn’t get lost.

The floorboards were damp and often rotting; at one point Aenlinn, taking point, nearly stepped into a hole as a couple of boards gave way. A foul stench rose from the foundations below.

In a corner room, Kethe stumbled upon a half-rotten wooden box that turned out to contain a fine set of silvered cutlery. She slipped them into her sling bag.

The battle in the dark

So far everything had been quiet except for a faint pattering sound, probably rats. Now the sound was slowly but surely growing louder. Was it coming from the north?

Dozens and dozens of rats (by unknown artist)

Sounded like it. Everyone took up positions with their backs to the nearest wall; Aenlinn pushed aside the rubble around her feet to get some space to maneuver.

The closest candle, the glow of which they could just see from a corner, went out – someone had knocked it over. And soon after, something swarmed into the light: dozens and dozens of rats.

Kethe, who already had trouble with the dark (since the expedition to the underground Laboratorium Terribilis), backed up against the wall in terror. The rats poured in among the adventurers, more aggressive than ever before, snapping and clawing at feet and legs wherever they could.

The vampire-thing (Art from Ubersreik Adventures)

The plank wall that Wernhart had backed up against didn’t go all the way up to the ceiling, and now something was moving over it! A small, rail-thin woman scampered over the wall and dropped onto his back. In the lantern light, the others caught a glimpse of a face mottled and streaked with dried blood, wild glassy eyes and baring sharp fangs to bite at his throat…

Wernhart managed to tear himself loose and ran his blade through the creature’s stomach, but the wound, which would have been fatal to an ordinary person, only caused her to scream and stagger backwards. Only a little blood, viscous and almost black, oozed out.

As Wernhart continued pushing the thing back, Kethe, having shaken off her fear by now, entered the fray as the rats went on at her, blood running down her legs. Aenlinn waded in too, knocking the creature to the ground with a deep sword-cut to its shoulder. But she wasn’t yielding, and to their astonishment, the adventurers saw her open wounds slowly closing up again.

Wernhart managed to run his rapier through her throat, nailing her to the floor. She was squirming wildly and it wasn’t going to hold her for long, but for the moment was pinned and immobile.

The rats, on the other hand, were biting and tearing more furiously than ever; Wernhart, already bleeding profusely, lost his footing and fell over in the churning sea of rats. With the courage of despair, he got back to his feet, smashed his buckler into the vampire woman’s face in frustration, and tried to recall what he’d read about how – at least according to legend – you could kill something like this.

Then he figured it out. “Beheading or fire!” he shouted hoarsely. “The bone saw! In my bag!”

Aenlinn’s swing didn’t quite decapitate the woman, but cut deep into her throat and might have broken her neck. Kethe, having dug out the bone saw as the rats eagerly continued nibbling on her, sawed off the neck vertebrae and kicked the woman’s severed head away. The body stopped wriggling, and soon the rats also lost interest and scurried off in different directions.

Everything was deathly quiet in the basement again. Wernhart put on a couple of makeshift bandages to stop the worst of the bleeding from his and Kethe’s wounds – Aenlinn had gotten away with scrapes and bruises – and they put the vampire woman’s head and body in a sack and dragged them along.

The Vampire’s lair

Bloodied and tired, our heroes rummaged through the rest of the basement until they found what appeared to be the vampire’s lair, a small room built in between the outer wall of stone and tall stacks of crates. Here was a small cot of dirty and bloody blankets; on a bench in one corner was a collection of broken and dirty cooking utensils, arranged as if in a fine kitchen. They noticed that the vampire was wearing a dress with faint traces of some sort of heraldic mark on it. Perhaps she worked in some noble family’s kitchen when she was alive?

There were no signs of more than one individual living here, and the rest of the basement contained only rubbish and, now no longer particularly aggressive, rats.

The quarantine is lifted

Annieke Zangvogel (Art from Ubersreik Adventures)

With some help from Annieke Zangvogel, the adventurers patched each other up more thoroughly. Kethe’s wounds appeared to be superficial and would heal quickly, but Wernhart would need at least a few days of rest to recover.

Then they went down to the entrance and tried to get the attention of the guards outside. After some arguing, they managed to get to talk to people from the Physicians’ Guild and the Chapel of the Nurturer, and when they showed them the vampire’s head and Dr. Alessandra Giuliani‘s diary, the doctors were finally convinced and had the quarantine lifted. Priests and novices from the Order of the Nurturer began to organise the transfer of the “infected” to the hospital where they could be cared for.

The Rookery in Spittelfeld (Art by JG O’Donohue)

Tired and beaten up, the adventurers dragged themselves back to the Crayfish Inn to rest, eat and wash off before writing their report to Baron Heinrich.

On their way back through the city, they heard some called-out news and disturbing rumours: it seemed that the Grand Prince of Ostland Hals von Tasseninck (who has his residence in the castle here in Wolfenburg) had imprisoned the envoys that his neighbour and rival, Grand Duke Gustav von Krieglitz of Talabeckland, had sent to complain about banditry in the borderlands. He demanded that “his son’s murderers” – the Grand Prince had gotten the idea that his son, Crown Prince Hergard von Tasseninck, who never returned from his mysterious expedition in the Grey Mountains, was murdered and that von Krieglitz was behind it – should be handed over before the envoys are released.

This was not likely to go down well in Talabeckland, and in any case, imprisoning diplomats was a serious escalation of the conflict. Did this mean that open war between the provinces – meaning a civil war within the Empire – might soon be a fact? Many believed that now, if not sooner, the Emperor had to get his act together and intervene…

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GM’s notes (spoilers)