LOL, Mark.
No, I just know you well enough to know that you would have a comment for me not posting.
So anyway, on with the story.
The next morning we got up in the inn and went down for breakfast. Klause, the innkeeper informed us of a bit of a disturbance last night, that we missed. It seems that some Musketeers had come in, looking for a Montaigne woman, stating that she was wanted for murder in Montaigne. He informed them, that no such woman was staying at his inn, and that they had no jurisdiction in the town of Freiburg, so could they please leave the inn before they woke up his guest. The Musketeer's left, but not happily.
Renee, hearing the story, thanked Klause for his discretion. We sat and had breakfast that Klause had fixed, then headed down to the old woman's house, to check about the demon that was inhabiting her cellar.
We get to the house and knock on her door. A stout old Eisen woman answered and asked what we wanted. "We've come to see about the demon in the celler." Rebecca answers her. The woman gives a quick look at all four of us, and invites us into her home, stating that Jan and Heinreich had informed her that we would be showing up. Rebecca looks over at Seig at the mentioning of the two men, confirming her thought that the twins had been heading over to the old woman's house last night after we left the bar.
Taking us over to one side of her living space, she points to the large wooden trap door in the floor, and has Seig open for her. "I haven't been down stairs in years, my lumbago keeps acting up, and the ceilings too low for me to stand proper."
"When exactly did the problem with the demon start?" Seig asks. "About two weeks or so, ago." The woman replied, "About the same time my cat disapeared."
The stairs down to the cellar are extreemly steep, and you had to avoid the doorway, ducking under it at about halfway down, and it was narrow so only one person could get down at a time. Taking a lamp, Seig makes his way down, while we watched, and places the lamp on the bottom step as he ducks under the doorframe. What he sees is a long narrow room, made of stone, but with roots of plants invading between. The back of the room is in shadow, because the lamp is being somewhat blocked by his body. We looking down at him from the room above, suddenly hear a low growl, as Seig is almost pulled away from sight, and a metal/wooden crash/crunching sound is heard, and Seig falls down back into the cellar stepway, with a bloody face, and semi-conscious. Before we could do anything, we see a hand reaching out of the darkness of the cellar and grab at Seig and start pulling him in. We also hear a crunching sound. Renee, who was going to follow Seig, grabs him, and starts trying to pull him back up, while Rebecca tries to see if there are any fatelines that she can alter, between the monster and Seig. She gets two lines, a weak red line, that as she watches gets weaker, but a strong weirdly colored yellow line, that comes off the hand and heads back into the cellar.
Renee has to go into the cellar to grab Seig, and in the back of the room she sees two beady red eyes staring back at her. She grabs Seig, and tries to head back up the stairs, but before she can, she is hit in the face with a rock. Realing a bit, she still is able to grab Seig and pull him back up. The blood on his face is mostly from his nose, and other than a torn area on his pant leg, he has no damage, beyond the bloody nose. The old woman shuts the trap door, to make sure the demon does not follow, but it didn't seem like he was going to anyway. Once Seig gets his wits back, they ask the old woman if the demon has ever left the cellar, and she informs them that no, he only stayed down there. So once again, the door is opened, and this time Rowena heads down, with her bow and arrow at ready. The lantern is lowered down and directed down the long hall shaped room. The far end of the room makes an L bend, so it is still in the dark. Rowena has to tilt her bow a bit to have it fit in the small room, and as she does so, a long gross arm comes reaching out from the dark at her, and grabs her bow and arrow. A tug of war ensues, and with a mighty pull, it grabs her bow and arrow and disapears back in the dark, leaving Rowena suprised and defenseless.
Seig comes back down and tries to get past Rowena, to get at the demon, but there is no room, so Rowena falls to the floor, and Seig jumps over her, and heads down the bend of the L. He is carrying the lantern, and as he gets around the corner, and Rowena gets back on her feet to follow, they both see a flash of light, trailing its way towards them, sparking and jumping. Both turn to head back to the entrance, but before they can make it, the bomb goes off, creating thick black smoke, that fills the whole room, and overflows up into the house, getting the rest of the people standing and waiting at the entrance of the cellar.
Unable to see in the billowing cloud, even with the lantern, Seig takes and covers his nose and mouth the best he can with a hankerchief, blocking most of the dust from his lungs, and decides to feel out the size of the room. It's not a very big room, but it does have a raised wall item in the center of it, that comes up to his shins. Feeling a bit more, he finds a wooden cover over the top of it, and knocks on it and listens. It sounds hollow, but the smoke is still so thick that he can't see it.
Rowena manages to make it out of the cellar, and coughing and hacking, along with the others, waits while the smoke clears, before they all (except the old woman), decide to head back down to see if Seig was ok.
The smoke is still thicker down in the cellar, but they find their way to Seig, and with a little help they find that the wooden cover is over a well. Seig explores the well, while the others explore the small room. Seig finds the body of a dead cat down in the well, and figures that it had been what the old woman had heard screaming a couple of weeks ago, and that there was something else going on, that the old woman didn't know about. Renee finds a broken and bloody shovel tossed over to one side of the room, and shows it to Seig, who remembers seeing it in the hand of the demon as it bashed him in the face with it.
Meanwhile, Rebecca had been looking around the small room, and on the far wall, found another trap door, this one about half the size of the wall it was on, and covered with the same stones as the wall, to blend in. She calls the others over, and they pull it open, to find another room beyond. The lantern that Seig is carring shows the walls of the room to be covered with bottles of liqueur. Seig opens one and finds out it is pure schnapps. Several empty bottles lay on the ground by the door, and a few of them are broken, with dried blood. Seig looks at the broken glass, and figures that there are a pair of "rats" involved, twin rats! All around the walls of the room, are bottles and bottles of schnapps, and in the center of the room, an old distillery, that looks like it hasn't been used in years, layers of dust cover it. On the other side of the room, again is another trap door in a wall, and they check it and find it leads to a hard packed dirt tunnel, crawling space only. Entering, they make their way slowly, on hands and knees, for a few yards, then the tunnel goes up, and a ladder and the bottom of another trap door can be seen. Seig leaves the lantern with Rowena, as he climbs the ladder,stops and listens at the top by the door, before opening it. The only sound he hears is the snorting of a horse and a chewing cud sound, that when he opens the trap door, finds it belongs to the dairy cow. Flipping the trap door open, he looks around and behind him, can see out the barn and towards the old woman's house.
They make their way out of the tunnel, and with knowing glances at each other, decide on what they are going to do. Seig, Rowena and Renee decide to stay in the barn and hide, waiting for the "return" of the demon to this trap door, while Rebecca decideds to go to the house to stay with the old Widow, also keeping an eye on the trap door in the house. She goes and returns to the house, suprising the Widow Bower. She informs the woman about the celler distillery and liqueur, but the old woman is very adamant that there is no distillery or liqueur in her house! Her husband became a tee-totaler when he married her, Theus rest his soul, and there absolutly could NOT be any liqueur in her house. To sooth the old widow, Rebecca agrees, and they sit and have a nice bit of tea and chat about the widow's husband, while the others wait in the barn.
Not to long, and a couple of shadows appear at the back of the barn, by the rear exit, and tip-toeing as best as they can, Jan and Heinreich slip their way into the barn, but before they get too far, they notice Renee, who thought she was hidden, and they head over to grab her, when they are suprised by Seig and Rowena, as Seig opens up the lantern to blind them, and Rowena blocks the back exit that they just came in from.
"You know guys," Seig informs the twins, "I really don't like getting hit in the face with a shovel. As a matter of fact, it's down right unethical." Jan and Heinreich stop in their tracks, suprised, and Heinreich tries to hide something behind him. Without further warning, Seig leaps at the two men, and grabs them both in a grip, that neither can break. (They are a bit drunk, and Seig is a tad angry.) Heinreich drops the item, which turns out to be a long claw like item, infact, the "claw" of the demon, they had been imitating, to keep the old woman out of her house at night, while they raided the cellar for the schnaps. Rebecca heard the noise the men were making in the barn, as they cried out for mercy in Seig's hold, and left the old woman in the house, who believed the demon was back. She went out and found the twins subdued. She informed Seig that the woman believed that there wasn't any liqueur in her house, and could not be changed in her mind. Hearing this, Heinreich said they would take the liqueur away, if we wanted, and then the old woman wouldn't have to worry about it. Rebecca looks over at the two men, then back to Seig. "I think that they need to take the schnapps over to Klaus's inn, for Klaus to sell." The two men look up at her in shock. "Can't we just take the schnapps?" "No one else has to know about this!" they say at the same time, but both Rebecca and Seig are not to be argued with, and before too long, all the schnapps is in Klaus' inn, and the innkeeper is stunned himself at the find. "I just can't accept this!" he states, "It's worth too much money!" "Then do something charitable with the profit you make off of it." Rebecca replies to him, "But I would rather you have it, then leave it to the twins, who would have drunk themselves to death, without a second thought." "I will have a charity day, every Sunday!" Klaus states. "Free food all day long, for whoever comes into my inn."
"That is perfect." Rebecca replies.
That is where we ended the game last night.
